


Amaranth and Ivy

by blackkat



Series: Herding Cats [2]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Torchwood
Genre: 5+1, F/M, Friendship, Humor, M/M, back from the dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-14
Updated: 2013-08-14
Packaged: 2017-12-23 11:18:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/925772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackkat/pseuds/blackkat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to <i>Golden Apples and Norse Gods</i>. Five times Ianto surprised the Avengers, and one time they surprised him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Amaranth and Ivy

**I.**

It’s early morning, the faintest hint of morning light just breaking through the clouds over the city, and Steve is enjoying the peace and quiet. Both are unusual when living in a tower with one rage monster cum slightly mad scientist, one deranged genius inventor with a penchant for explosions and a distinct lack of self-preservation, a sneaky marksman far too fond of practical jokes, the vindictive assassin often the target of those jokes, and all the madness that comes along with them.

Sometimes, Steve feels like the only normal one, and that’s a _truly_ terrifying thought.

But he’s not the only normal one now, he reminds himself, as the other resident sane man makes his way into the kitchen to start the coffee machine. Ianto Jones, formerly of Cardiff, formerly of Torchwood, formerly doing something that even Steve's security clearance and Tony's hacking can't uncover, has so far—three weeks into his tenure as resident Avengers babysitter—appeared to be nothing more than a perfect, impeccably suitable butler. It’s…rather nice, actually.

“Captain?” Ianto offers politely, lifting the coffee pot in query, and Steve wastes no time nodding. He’s becoming ever fonder of coffee as his stay in the present progresses, and Tony has quite a lot to do with that. Ianto's coffee, especially, is better than anything Steve's had before, even from some of the fanciest cafés in the city.

Ianto pours them each a mug, doctors both with just a touch of cream and sugar, and joins Steve at the table in front of the huge window. This high up, it’s a perfect view across New York’s sea of silvered buildings and all the way to the grey-blue Atlantic. Steve takes his with a smile of thanks and then just breathes deeply, savoring the morning’s calm. A glance at the Welshman shows that he also looks more relaxed than normal, the lines around his eyes eased a bit (though one has to look very hard to see them at all, usually) as he absently taps away at the tablet in front of him.

And then the kitchen door flies open so hard it slams into the wall with a resounding crash and rebounds, and a small, slender, utterly terrifying figure stalks through, hands clenched into fists at her side.

“Where,” Natasha spits, fury in every line of her body, “did you hide them?”

Since Steve, happily, has absolutely no idea what she’s talking about and is therefore most likely not at fault, he shifts wide eyes over to the man seated across from him, who still hasn’t so much as looked up.

“Pardon?” Ianto asks mildly, surveying what look suspiciously like stock prices.

Before Steve can so much as blink, Natasha is across the room, bringing one deadly hand down sharply on the table an inch away from Ianto's mug.

“ _My weapons_ ,” she hisses. “ _Where are they_?”

Carefully, deliberately, Ianto raises his head and gives the Black Widow a flat look that nevertheless seems to speak volumes regarding his disappointment in her life choices. “Ah,” he says. “That.” Then, with admirable nonchalance in the face of an irate assassin, he flips over the tablet, swipes to a new window, and holds up the image of a very official-looking document stamped with several bright red URGENT notices. “Been to SHIELD Medical lately, Ms. Romanoff? Because they _desperately_ want to see you. So much so that they’ve sent out…” He checks his pad, and smiles. It’s fairly terrifying in and of itself. “Sixty-two messages in the last four months, to remind you of the mandatory yearly checkup that it seems you’ve missed the last four years running. Quite a feat.”

With equal deliberation, Natasha leans down to look him right in the eyes, and says clearly, “I. Don’t. Like. Doctors.”

“Understandable,” Ianto parries coolly, and he doesn’t look unnerved in the least. Steve envies him a little, because he’s only on the edge of Natasha's killing intent and it’s already making him want to dive for cover. “However, they are a necessary evil, and until I have proof that you’ve undergone your checkup, the weapons stay gone.”

“Zhri govno i zdohni!” Natasha spits at him.

Ianto raises one black brow. “Do you kiss Clint with that mouth?”

Clint, just stepping through the door, hears and promptly chokes on his coffee, even as Natasha growls something in Russian that even _sounds_ filthy at the Welshman.

“Cau dy ffwcin ceg,” Ianto answers promptly, already drawn back to his stocks. “Sooner would be better, Ms. Romanoff. I would hate it if you had to sit out the next fight because you were unarmed.”

The door slams behind her hard enough to shake the whole kitchen, and Clint, having retreated to safety beside the toaster, winces in sympathy. “I hope you sleep with your door welded shut, man. You hid her weapons? _All_ of them?”

That brow lifts in Clint's direction now. “Indeed. I assume she’ll be sufficiently motivated now?”

“Yeah,” Clint agrees cheerfully. “To _dismember_ you.”

The brow goes a little higher, then drops entirely as Ianto returns to his tablet, and Steve resists the urge to thump his head against the tabletop a few times.

So much for two sane men.

This is one burden, it seems, that he’ll have to bear alone.

**II.**

Dr. Doom is usually more the purview of the Fantastic Four, but seeing as New York’s other resident idiot genius has trapped himself and his team in some sort of singularity event, it falls to the Avengers to deal with the madman currently tearing up the city by way of winged dinosaurs.

Bruce is entirely unamused.

“Captain, you're sure—?” he starts again.

“ _Doctor_.” Steve is beginning to sound both breathless and aggravated, states that are entirely uncommon when he’s not dealing with Tony. “Please. Focus on getting these portals closed. With Richards out of commission and Iron Man here, you’re—”

“Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope,” Tony cuts in with a high, breathy falsetto, and Bruce can all but _hear_ him fluttering his eyelashes obnoxiously over the comm channel. He rolls his eyes, but keeps his gaze on the screen in front of him regardless.

Clint doesn’t have nearly as much restraint. He snorts loudly over the sharp, twanging thud of his bowstring, and mutters, “Oh dear god, Stark, you're such a nerd.” A pause, and then, “Original trilogy, right?”

“Barton!” Tony sounds highly scandalized. “What do you take me for?”

“I was just checking!” Hawkeye says defensively, even as another arrow strikes somewhere and then explodes. Really, Tony has far too much fun with Clint's bag of trick arrows. Bruce should probably take them away from him at some point, but he hasn’t yet had the heart. “But, uh, in this situation don’t you think Jurassic Park might be a little more appropriate?”

There's a moment of contemplative silence as the red-and-gold figure of Iron Man rockets around a pair of pterodactyls doing battle at the street corner, and then Tony grants, “Good point, Barton.”

“Thank you, Stark, I thought so too.”

“Codenames,” Steve snaps at both of them. “Stick to _codenames_ on comm frequencies.”

“Sure thing, Spangles!”

“Yessir, Cap’n, sir!”

It’s not quite a chorus, but it might as well be. Bruce rolls his eyes again, and then nearly jumps out of his skin when a slim, pale hand reaches over his shoulder to tap out a quick command on the neighboring computer. He twists a little to look up at their glorified babysitter, and Ianto offers him a swift, slightly distracted smile in return before shifting his attention to the image of the fighting dinosaurs.

“Those are…” he murmurs softly.

Still, it’s not soft enough to escape Steve's notice. “Something wrong, Agent Jones?” he asks, concern coloring his tone.

Ianto straightens up, eyes still on the monitor, and ignores the captain. “JARVIS, can you tell me where Hawkeye keeps his stash of Belgian chocolate? It’s urgent.”

“Of course, Agent Jones,” JARVIS answers over Clint's emphatic squawks of protest. “On the top shelf, behind Sir’s powdered algae, in the tin marked ‘bee pollen and wheatgrass extract.’”

“No wonder no one’s ever found it,” Bruce mutters, grimacing a bit as the Welshman pulls out several bars of dark chocolate. He’s all for health and alternatives to pharmaceuticals, but even he tends to get a bit queasy when faced with some of the concoctions that Tony sucks down in place of solid food.

“My perfect hiding place,” Clint bemoans. “Jones, if you’ve got the munchies—”

Ianto rolls his eyes. He’s better at it than Bruce. “Hardly,” he drawls, throwing open the window and stepping out onto the balcony, where another green-brown pterodactyl has landed and is in the process of tearing apart a lounge chair. Instantly, his whole demeanor changes, and he calls softly, “Here we are, lovely. Want some chocolate. It’s good for your serotonin levels…if you’ve got serotonin levels. Never did find that out, did we? Owen was always such a prat about checking Myfanwy over, hmm?”

The pterodactyl lifts its head and clacks its beak in warning. Ianto makes no move except to break off a chunk of chocolate and stand his ground. Caught entirely flat-footed, Bruce tries not to let his pulse spike, even as he feels the Other Guy tensing inside of him.

The Welshman is clearly insane, and Bruce isn’t about to let him commit suicide by dinosaur. Not after what he went through with Loki already.

(He spares a brain cell to notice that there’s complete silence over the comms, too—likely for the first time ever.)

And then the pterodactyl steps forward, opens its beak, and Ianto chucks the chocolate right down its gullet.

A pause, a hesitation, a careful swallow. The pterodactyl drops to all fours with a soft rumbling sound, and opens its mouth for more.

“No way,” Tony says in hushed awe. “The butler just defeated a dinosaur with _chocolate_. There's got to be some kind of kickass meter somewhere that was just shattered into teensy tiny little bits. There _must_ be.”

Ianto breaks off another piece of the bar, and when Bruce looks closely, he can see the faint hint of a sweet, fond smile on the man’s face. “They're pteranadons,” is all he says, however. “They’ve a weakness for chocolate, the darker and higher quality, the better.”

A very long, strained moment of silence.

“Well,” Clint says, clearing his throat. “As long as it’s for a good cause. But you owe me, Jones.”

“Indeed.”

Ianto's still smiling, just a little.

**III.**

Steve isn’t some innocent little flower, and it always rather amuses Tony when someone intimates that he is. He grew up in _Brooklyn_. He was in the _army_. He fought in a _war_ , for crying out loud.

Even so, this modern world can still be a touch too much for him sometimes. Like now.

Tony watches him gaping at the television, where the camera is panning slowly over the crowd of elated people. It’s not pausing to focus on any of them, but it’s still more than enough to show men and women kissing other men and women, one man down on one knee in front of his partner, a women crying in her partner’s arms with a ring shining bright and clear on her finger.

“That’s…” Steve says weakly.

From where he’s sitting by the window with his tablet, Ianto looks up. “Ah,” he says dryly. “The internet just exploded. Dare I assume it passed?” Then he notices the look on Steve's face and arches a dark brow at Tony.

Because Tony is a genius, he understands every single thing Ianto is trying to convey, and even though he hasn’t blushed in well over twenty years his face decides now might be a good time to remember how that whole mortification thing works. “Hey,” he says quickly, because those pale blue eyes are so freaking _guilt-inducing_ that they should be marketed as every cop’s secret weapon. “Hey, since when did it become _my_ job to fill the Capsicle in on every little bit of cultural advancement in the last seventy years?”

That brow lifts another quarter of an inch, and that’s when Tony realizes he really actually would probably rather that Ianto _not_ answer that question, because it involves stupid, idiot Tony and stupidly hot, sweet Steve and feelings more appropriate in a fifteen-year-old girl than the Avengers’ backer and resident genius billionaire philanthropist who has entirely toned down on the playboy image since one defrosted supersoldier came into his life.

Ho boy.

Ianto smiles, then, and it’s a terrifying little twisted grin that has _no right_ to be that scary, but which makes Tony's admittedly rather battered and abused sense of self-preservation start gibbering and running around in circles. Then Ianto stands, graceful in his economy of motion, and starts to cross the room.

This is not going to end well for him, Tony can already tell.

“Whoa. Hey there.” Tony can backpedal with the best of them, and this situation definitely calls for it. He holds up his hands—in surrender or to ward off the other man, he isn’t entirely sure—and leans back in his chair. “Jeeves, behave yourself, that wasn’t a challenge and this is—eek!”

Ianto smirks at him from where he’s now straddling Tony's thighs, and okay, yeah, six months ago Tony would totally have hit that in a hot second except for the fact that Steve is _right there_ and—

“Some things are best demonstrated rather than left to exposition, don’t you agree?” Ianto asks, as though it’s a _reasonable_ thing to say and not involving laps and the disregard of personal space and Steve staring at them with very, very wide blue eyes.

Then Tony can't see Steve anymore, because Ianto leans in and damn.

The man can _kiss_.

Somewhere— _not_ Steve's direction, which Tony is entirely attuned to—there's the sound of a throat clearing, rich with suppressed amusement, and then Bruce drawls, “The gay marriage bill passed, then?”

Ianto pulls back, looking entirely too composed for what his tongue was just doing to Tony's tonsils, and then slides off of Tony's lap without a hint of shame. “Yes,” he agrees smoothly, and favors Tony once more with that evil, evil smile. Steve is staring—not at Ianto, which Tony could understand, but at _him_ , and that’s—

That’s equal parts terrifying as hell and so insanely hopeful that Tony's freaking heart is about to beat right out of his chest.

With a soft sound of amusement, Ianto steps between them as he crosses the room, breaking their line of sight, and they both look up to follow his progress. He collects his tablet, tucks it under one arm, and heads for the door, where he pauses and glances back.

“For the record, Mr. Stark,” he says blandly, “Jeeves was English. I am Welsh.”

Then the doorway is empty, because their butler is obviously a ninja who could teach the resident assassins a trick or two, and Bruce is sniggering and Steve is watching Tony again, and Tony looks back at him for just a second.

Their eyes meet, hold.

So that’s all right, then.

**IV.**

Were Natasha to describe her relationship with the most recent addition to the Avengers team, she would have to say…complicated. Not that she doesn’t admire Ianto Jones at least a little—she’s seen him corral Tony and Clint on one side, sooth Bruce on the other, shake Steve out of his wary polite distance, and manage Fury with aplomb, all at once, and it’s very hard to walk away from a scene like that without at least a _little_ respect coming out of it—but he’s an other. A stranger. She doesn’t know his background, can't find it out no matter how she looks, and Ianto keeps himself at a strange, careful distance—close but never too much so, on hand but never underfoot, present and yet not. He’s a conundrum, and Natasha is a person who has never appreciated mysteries in anyone but herself or mindless, implausible action novels.

Not to mention he not only managed find every single weapon she secreted in her room and around the tower, but then managed to _hide_ said weapons in places she _couldn’t find_. That most definitely cooled her attitude towards the mild-mannered Welshman.

Nevertheless, when the Avengers are on a mission deep in the Alps—AIM, again, and one would think that a secret organization that dresses its members up in those hideous yellow suits would be easier to find—and their base camp is attacked out of nowhere, Natasha can't help a ripple of worry for the man. He’s only human, after all, and certainly none of the Avengers are that anymore, which makes him by far the most vulnerable one of the group.

She ducks behind a thick tree just to get a moment to catch her breath and resettle her bracelets when a sudden scuffle from the direction of the one-room cabin Ianto and Tony commandeered for the tech draws her attention. An AIM soldier is kicking in the door, and Natasha feels her blood run cold as she remembers that Ianto is in there alone, coordinating with Steve and Clint, and with a shout of warning to Tony she takes off running.

(Because somehow her favorite hot cocoa mix keeps finding its way into the cupboards at the tower, and at least one night a week there somehow manages to be a classic movie playing despite the others’ protests, and sometimes when she drags herself into the main room after a long night of insomnia Ianto will be there with a mug of herbal tea—his own mix, always, smelling of lavender and peppermint and lime blossoms and honey—for himself and one sitting on the table for her, always, always and she’s _never_ had anyone try to take care of her before,  hadn’t thought she wanted it but—)

So she runs, even though it’s very likely she’ll be too late, and all but falls though the doorway—

Just in time to see Ianto kick the AIM soldier in the gut, knocking him back, and then jam a stun gun into the side of his neck. A crackle of electricity and the man collapses to the floor with a jarring thud.

“Widow?” Ianto asks, and Natasha jerks her gaze up from the fallen man to the former Torchwood agent. “Is everything all right?”

“I saw—” Natasha starts, and then stops herself, because for all that Ianto has been their babysitter for almost six months now, they’ve never really had a conversation on anything of greater importance than the weather. In the face of that, even factoring everything else, her reaction is—

But rather than retreating to a polite distance, or giving her an odd look, Ianto just nods. “I see,” he says easily, as though her response is entirely natural, and slides his stun gun away as he turns back to the computer by the wall. “Can you cover me for a moment? There’s some sort of field around the base, but I think that with Tony's input I can disable it.”

Having an actual task is almost a relief, and Natasha falls back to the doorway, gun at the ready.

It’s only when three AIM goons rush her at once that she remembers Ianto's perfectly executed kick, and resolves to drag him to the gym to spar with her at some point in the very near future.

**V.**

After the whole mess with Loki and the Tessaract, it’s hard for Clint not to feel some kind of admiration for Ianto and his ability to so casually and competently trick the god. Of course, it helps that he was in full possession of his right mind at the time, that Loki wanted a servant rather than the slave that Clint was, but it’s still impressive.

It also makes something twist in Clint's gut when he comes out one morning, very early, to find Ianto sitting on the couch with a far-off, wistful look on his face as he watches the stars outside fade to nothing.

Clint hovers in the doorway for a moment, uncertain, and then takes a careful step into the room. He isn’t good with emotions—that’s Steve's place. Clint is just the guy who shoots things.

But…

But Ianto looks up at him and smiles in greeting, and it isn’t nearly enough to mask the longing in his eyes, the weary sadness written into every line of his face. Clint steels himself and crosses to the couch across from the agent, dropping down with a huff that’s part embarrassment and part exasperation at himself.

“You left someone behind, didn’t you?” he asks after a moment, because Clint's never been one for beating around the bush—Natasha always says he’s got all the subtlety and tact of a brick to the face, and Clint doesn’t disagree.

But Ianto doesn’t seem offended. Rather, he turns back to the window and nods, just faintly. “Yes,” he says softly. “Though as far as that goes, you could also say I was the one left behind.”

None of them—even Fury, much to the director’s annoyance—know exactly what happened while Loki had Ianto, or even how Loki got him in the first place. There’s a death certificate for one Ianto Jones that’s now been rescinded, but that most certainly tells them nothing—such things are easy to fake, after all. And as for Ianto's life before Loki, before SHIELD and the Avengers, that’s the biggest mystery of all, and if Fury knows anything about that, he’s not talking.

Then Ianto shifts, and this time his smile is fond rather than wistful, quietly happy rather than melancholy. “Jack,” he says, “his name is Jack. And he’s…everything.”

Clint thinks about Natasha, about red in ledgers and a small woman with the heart of a dragon and the courage of a hundred normal people, abandoning one life for Clint's weak offer of possible shelter and potential safety, nothing guaranteed. He thinks about the only person, before the Avengers, that he truly trusted to watch his back, and then lets out a fond smile of his own.

“Everything,” he echoes. “Yeah, I get that.”

Ianto looks up at him, smile going crooked, and that’s when the bullets start flying.

The windows shatter with a thundering crash, sending shards of glass flying as Clint and Ianto both take cover behind the couch, flattening themselves to the ground. Clint's mind is already working, trying to identify and locate, trying to remember if he’s got anything hidden in this room that will—

The butt of a gun slaps into his palm, and he looks over at Ianto in surprise. The Welshman has a long knife, and he snorts at Clint's look and murmurs, “Natasha.”

Clint spares a moment of gratitude for Natasha's paranoia, frighteningly the equal to his own, and then he’s up and firing at the men rappelling in through the broken window. He gets two as they drop in, then has to turn and punch another who’s already inside and on his feet. To the side, he can hear a dull clang as Ianto blocks the barrel of a rifle with his knife and then uses the moment of struggle to drop the man with a very nice haymaker. But three more men in black fatigues are closing, and Clint can't take them all at once.

And then Natasha is there, whirling and twisting, and they're down for the count. It leaves Clint free to deal with the new wave from outside, where a gleam of red and gold and a deep, furious roar signal that Tony and Bruce are dealing with whatever mode of transport their attackers are using.

But somewhere in the room, a gun that isn’t Clint's goes off, and there's a sharp, breathless grunt and then a thud.

“Ianto!” Steve calls from the doorway, sharp and desperate, and a round blur of patriotic color knocks the man with the gun right out the window. Clint's already turning, seeing no more enemies in the room, and—

And Ianto, half-collapsed against the couch, a spreading red stain on the left side of his chest.

 _No_ , Clint thinks, something cold rising up in his gut. _Not again_.

Ianto isn’t Coulson, hasn’t been with them nearly as long as Phil was with Clint and Natasha, but he’s still _theirs_ , and Clint doesn’t need Steve wrenching open Ianto's shirt to know that that’s a bullet to the heart. There's no coming back from that.

Except—

Ianto coughs, groans, and opens his eyes.

The bleeding slows, stops.

The wound closes.

“Damn,” Ianto says rather breathlessly into the frozen, shocked silence, dropping his head back against the couch. “I liked that shirt.”

Startlingly, Natasha is the first one to drop to her knees next to him, face even paler than normal, eyes sharp. She growls something that Clint can't bring himself to translate and wraps an arm around Ianto's shoulder in the closest thing to a hug Clint's ever seen her give someone else.

“What?” Steve asks, wide-eyed, still bent over as though he’ll be called to do CPR at any moment. “But…you were—”

A little gingerly, Ianto sits up, one hand going to his chest. “You didn’t think I worked for Loki for free, did you?” he asks lightly. “A golden apple and my name erased from Hel’s book—that was the payment. Good to see he upheld his end.”

Clint forces out a rush of breath that doesn’t want to leave his lungs, scrubs a hand over his face, and then groans. “You,” he says pointedly, “are bad for the blood pressure. Couldn’t you have told us about this _before_ you went and got yourself shot?”

Ianto chuckles, but accepts the hand up that Clint offers him regardless.

\+ **I.**

Jack's renting a tiny little shoebox of an apartment while the Hub is being rebuilt, just a place to sleep and wash himself when he’s so covered in construction dust that people on the street give him strange looks. He hates it, hates that he’s back on Earth at all, but he can't stay away from Earth, and he most certainly can't stay away from Cardiff. It’s where he’s buried his heart and soul, where he’s spilled more blood on the ground than he can remember, where everything that was ever even a little good in his life existed.

Cardiff is Ianto's home, more than anywhere else in the universe, and for that reason alone, Jack will stay there until the city crumbles around him.

Heaving an exhausted sigh, Jack lets himself crumple to the cold, bare sheets of his equally tiny bed, and closes his eyes.

He’s alone, and he’s never noticed it more.

There are options, of course, or there would be if he were willing to take them. At one point, Jack would have thought nothing of going out and losing himself in the first willing body he came across, but now he just…doesn’t have any interest.

Ianto Jones has absolutely ruined him for everyone else. It would be funny, if it weren’t so very, very heartbreaking.

A quick, firm rap at the door makes him sit up with a frown, because absolutely no one has any cause to be visiting him. Gwen doesn’t even know he’s back on Earth, his rent is paid, the construction crews don’t know his address—

The knock comes again, more firmly this time, and Jack pulls himself to his feet and takes four strides across the room to open it.

A man and a woman are standing there. The woman is lovely, a pale redhead with sharp eyes and three knives that Jack can see, and likely more that he can't. She carries herself like a fighter. The man is tall and broad and blond, gorgeous is a wholesome, heartening way, and has a round leather-covered case strapped to his back. They're both looking at Jack with appraisal in their eyes, and he arches a brow at them.

“Can I help you?” he asks.

The man opens his mouth, but before he can say anything, the woman steps forward, untucking a folder from under her arm and pulling a glossy photograph from it. “I think, Captain Harkness,” she says, and there’s a faint accent there that Jack can almost make out, “that in this case a picture is truly worth a thousand words.”

Entirely unsuspecting, Jack takes the picture and flips it over.

His heart entirely stops.

It’s Ianto, not pale and sickly and dying as Jack last saw him, but lean and vibrant and elegant, the way he was at the very best of Torchwood times. He’s wearing an earpiece and a suit, standing in the middle of a rushing mass of uniformed agents and clearly issuing orders, and looking at him—here, present, currently alive and _living_ —feels as though someone is ripping Jack's heart out if his chest with their fingernails. He swallows hard and looks up at the strangers, and is startled to see the blond smiling at him.

“He talks about you a lot,” the man says softly, as though he knows very well that these words are enough to unmake Jack completely. “If you're even half the hero he paints you as, it’s my honor to meet you, Captain Harkness.”

The woman nods, just once, a brisk, no-nonsense movement. “He’s helped us,” she adds, and it’s almost sharp. “He’s been there for us, and now we want to do something for him. You will accompany us, Captain, or I will use force.”

She’s very clearly not bluffing, and while this small woman threatening a man twice her size should probably be funny, Jack is more than able to realize just how willing she is to back up her words with a demonstration.

Not that he needs convincing, he thinks, looking back down at the face of the man he’d thought gone forever. There will be time for explanations and questions later.

Right now, all he wants in the entire universe is Ianto.

“Right,” he says simply. “Let’s go.”

The woman smiles at him, and the man grins, and without pause they escort him down the hall.

Towards Ianto, and that’s really all that matters. 


End file.
